9 GEO mistakes that are killing your AI visibility (and how to fix them)
Most brands getting into generative engine optimization are making the same mistakes – publishing scaled AI content without oversight, gaming authority signals, blocking AI crawlers by accident, and measuring the wrong things. GEO isn’t a bag of hacks. It’s built on the same fundamentals as SEO, just applied to how AI systems discover, evaluate, and recommend your brand. Here are nine mistakes we see regularly, and how to fix each one.
5 Steps to Build External Validation for AI Recommendations
AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews don’t just pull from your website. As we’ve already covered extensively in our articles about how AI decides which businesses to recommend, they mainly look for external validation such as mentions, reviews, listings, and editorial coverage that confirm your brand is real, relevant, and trusted.
How ChatGPT Decides Which Businesses to Recommend
ChatGPT recommendations are usually driven by corroborated trust, not by a single Google ranking. In practice, brands get named more often when the model can verify the same positioning across third-party lists, reviews, editorial mentions, and clear on-site proof. Strong SEO helps discovery, but distributed validation drives recommendation confidence.
7 Steps to Get a New Brand Into AI Search Results From Scratch
Getting a new brand visible in both Google and AI search requires a deliberate, layered approach – starting with precise positioning, building a machine-resolvable identity, stacking proof, and earning external validation across the sources AI systems actually pull from. SEO remains foundational, but AI visibility demands distributed trust that no single ranking can provide.